Airy Nothings: Religion and the Flight from Time

Peter Heinegg

doi:10.5771/9780761862536

Summary

Even as the number of unbelievers continues to rise, religion in America still gets unwarrantably good press. The tenets and teachings, however nonsensical, of each and every “community of faith” may not be attacked. Secular academics who would never be caught in a synagogue, church, or mosque seldom fail to manifest politically correct reverence for the creeds, codes, and cults of the religious. Unfortunately, the central religious concept of the “sacred” proves, upon closer inspection, to be fictitious. The understandably popular “holy” times, places, deities, peoples, books, laws, and scenarios for the afterlife are fantasies projected into everyday experience by human beings trapped in time and unwilling to accept their own transiency and long-term insignificance. This book surveys the various traditional “fortresses” of the sacred and finds them all empty and indefensible.